TOGETHER, WE ARE GREATER

Cities exist because, together, we are greater than the sum of our parts. Being close together makes organizations more productive, makes people more creative, and drives collisions and new ideas that breed innovation. But as the opportunities in cities cause urban areas to grow in size and population, they need new solutions to address the strain this growth creates.

SOLUTIONS FOR CITY LIFE

Enter 'Urban Tech', or 'tech-enabled urban development'. Urban technology encompasses innovations and solutions that directly address the challenges posed by urbanization, faced by government, businesses, and citizens as urban systems grow. It seeks new solutions for producing our food, delivering water, and managing waste; solutions that get us moving; that affect the places we sleep, live, study and work; and that help inform and support citizens and service providers, at city scale.

The Urban Tech Hub at New Lab was one of NYCEDC's first major investments in the city's urban tech sector, helping companies scale frontier technologies through connections, networks, resources, and specialized programming. Pictured: Alana Ohno and Elizabeth Rojas of startup CARMERA.

URBANTECH NYC: A PROGRAM, A BRAND, A CONNECTION

To directly support the economy around Urban Tech, the NYCEDC launched Urbantech NYC in 2015, which invests in innovation and support for entrepreneurs making cities more livable, sustainable, and resilient. The program leverages flexible and affordable workspace, industry networks, proof of concept opportunities, and tailored programming to build NYC's urban tech community.

THE ECOSYSTEM SCALES

Most recently, in response to exponential growth in NYC's urban tech ecosystem and a need to increase and strengthen connections in the urban tech community, NYCEDC announced "The Grid" in February 2019. The Grid is an industry partner network balancing interests and urban tech focus areas, in order to lead, coordinate, sustain, and democratize access to the world's most powerful urban tech ecosystem.

According to Yale Fox, Founder/CEO of urban tech startup Rentlogic, "the diversity and depth of real estate here means that we have endless opportunities to try new approaches and tap into creative ecosystems." Pictured: Christian Flores, Software Engineer at Rentlogic.

The ecosystem thrives not only on our shared passion for the urban tech sector, but our shared passion for the city itself. Pictured: Tanaya Bhave of startup Toggle Industries and Kat Ermant of Urban-X.

THE HOME WE ALL BUILT

While the NYCEDC continues to invest in urban tech's rise, NYC's urban tech community is not any single agency or organization. Instead, it is the collective ideas of all its urban tech actors: the emerging and the established, the public and the private, working together toward a vision for one of the world's greatest cities, enabled by innovations we conceive, develop, and accelerate, together.

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